Kelly McParland: U.S. needs more corpses before it acts against guns

U.S. needs more corpses before it acts against guns

The Starbucks coffee people find themselves in a difficult situation as the U.S. ponders its latest mass shooting.

Wary of getting caught up in the debilitating debate over America’s obsessions with guns, it has sought to play a middle line, going along with whatever state law prescribed. So in one state you could carry your weapon openly, just in case you were attacked by a crazed cappuccino fiend and needed to defend yourself, while customers in other states were forced to go gunless and risk death in the same circumstance.

This won it the appreciation of gun enthusiasts, who even staged a Starbucks Appreciation Day to express their gratitude. The effort only served to embarrass the company, which had to shut its location in Newtown, Conn., rather than face glorification by gun-lovers while others mourned the shooting death of 20 kids and six adults at the local school.

So now Starbucks is trying to ease out of the quandary, by asking customers, politely, to leave their guns outside. In announcing the policy, chief executive Howard Schultz reflected the frustration of trying to deal with an issue that long ago left behind any semblance of reasonable debate.

Gun enthusiasts “disingenuously portray Starbucks as a champion of ‘open carry’,” he complained. “To be clear: we do not want these events in our stores.” Still, the chain refrained from banning guns rather than risk the possibility of staff being challenged by armed customers.

Instead, it offered “responsible gun owners a chance to respect its request.” Which, as usual, will prove pointless. Because responsible gun owners aren’t the problem. Nutbars are. But responsible gun owners in the U.S. are too devoted to their weapons to take the necessary steps to disarm the nutbars.

The most recent “shooter” — the preferred non-judgmental term used to describe mass killers — is Aaron Alexis, who’d had previous troubles with guns and had been hearing voices in his head. The pro-gun position is that such massacres result from flawed process: a guy like Alexis simply shouldn’t be able to get his hands on a weapon like the one he used to kill 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. Which, unquestionably, is true. Except that people like Alexis will always find a way to arm themselves in a country that makes it so easy, just as drug addicts will always find a way to get drugs and child abusers will always find children to abuse.

Arguing with the gun lobby is useless, as Schultz evidently understands. For decades, the tobacco industry successfully fended off efforts to curb smoking by the simple expedient of denying the obvious. Long after it became clear that smoking caused cancer, the industry fought vociferously to insist no such link could be proven. At one point in the 1980s the chief executives of the biggest tobacco firms appeared before a congressional hearing and swore on the bible that they all believed smoking was healthy.

The rules didn’t change until so many Americans knew someone who’d been killed by smoking that the absurdity of the industry position became obvious. It’s easy to defend smoking when other people die; much harder when your own parents or children waste away in front of you.

Which suggests that there simply hasn’t been enough carnage yet for the U.S. to make the obvious decision about gun laws. Not enough people have had a loved one killed by a gun to turn them against the gun lobby. Though violence has been a feature of American history since its foundation, it’s only in the past generation that senseless mass shootings have combined with the proliferation of mass media to turn large-scale murder into a media event irresistible to a certain sort of unstable mind. When Charles Whitman climbed the radio tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot 49 people in 1966 it came as a shock to an unprepared nation. Stuff like that didn’t happen every day. Now it happens so often, even the platitudes have become routine. But not enough to muster the political pressure to overcome opposition to effective action.

Obviously, there haven’t been enough corpses in the 45 years since Whitman to change the debate. When Barack Obama urged Congress, yet again, to address gun violence this week, he noted as much.

” You know, I do get concerned that this becomes a ritual that we go through every three, four months, where we have these horrific mass shootings. Everybody expresses understandable horror. We all embrace the families and obviously our thoughts and prayers are with those families right now– as they’re absorbing this incredible loss. And yet we’re not willing to take some basic actions that we know would make a difference.”

He blamed Congress for not acting, but Congress will act as soon as the voting majority in the U.S. turns against guns, and not before. Americans just aren’t there yet. Not enough of them have suffered the impact of gun deaths first hand, though the number is growing at a tragic rate.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.